South Asian Studies

Zooey Live blogs about being a South Asian graduate student and South Asian Studies, one of her points is this:

[T]here is also something else which intrigues me about the South Asian departments. Something that’s also very visible in this class. So few of their students work on modern and/or contemporary South Asia. It’s not that I think working on pre-modern South Asian texts or societies is inherently bad. But there is also this general reluctance to acknowledge the existence of a modern South Asia. Very similar to the project of classical Indology. Which relegated India perpetually into the realm of “ancient.” And my pea-sized brain tells me this is not just an innocent fascination with the pre-modern past. But indeed, this is a very problematic manisfestation of an evolutionary understanding of the world and not totally unconnected to the racial-colonial politics which attempted to colonize non-Western territories by claiming that the people in there are not that “modern.”